Extremes meet – or not

As Jean Kazez mentioned in comments, Mark Vernon has an article in TPM about doubt and agnosticism. He does indeed, and I disagree with much of it, in some places quite strongly. I always did, but I kept it to myself.

First he was a priest, then he became an atheist. And then –

I found I was actually becoming an agnostic. Over time, I came to feel that the triumphalism that too often seems to be part and parcel of atheism entails a poverty of spirit that is detrimental to our humanity. It tends to ignore or ridicule the “big” questions of life – those questions of existence that are natural to ask, if never finding conclusive answers – for fear of letting theology in through the back door.

I don’t think that’s true. (Of course, Vernon’s experience of atheists is probably different from mine, and maybe he does know lots of atheists like that – but in terms of public atheists, atheists who write about atheism in books and magazines, I don’t recognize his description.) I think he phrases it (as so often) too sweepingly. What I see atheists ridicule is not the questions themselves but the assumption that the questions have external answers, and that the answers are of a goddy or ‘spiritual’ kind.

I came to think that whether or not God exists is an open question, having pondered the arguments for and against several times over. And that keeping it open, rather than trying to find a knockout blow one way or another, is key.

Too sweeping, again. (Also awkward. I should have rearranged that first sentence, so that the ‘having pondered’ came first. My bad.) In a sense the existence of God is always an open question, because (as theists are always so brightly saying) it can’t be proven one way or the other. But this notion of keeping it open rather than trying to find a ‘knockout blow’ is just a dressed up way of saying the whole subject should be left alone, should be abandoned, should be a matter of ‘faith’ or its absence – should, in short, be immune from rational inquiry. But it shouldn’t. That’s because what we’re trying to find (‘we’ being atheists) is not really a knockout blow and not just whether or not god exists, but whether or not there are any good reasons to think god exists. We’re working on an epistemological issue as well as an ontological one, and I don’t think Mark Vernon has much business telling us we should stop doing that. We live in a world full of people more or less commanding us to believe that god does exist – a world in which Osama bin Laden has just very definitely commanded us to believe that Allah exists and to convert to his religion – and we want to go on asking why we should believe it.

My agnosticism gradually became more committed and passionate. It seemed to me to embody an attitude to life that is severely, even dangerously, lacking in public life. Think of the endless skirmishes between science and religion. They are at best a cul-de-sac, and at worse a risky self-indulgence…They are dangerous because in forcing people to take sides, they are pushed to fundamentalist extremes – whether based on religious or scientific dogma.

This is where Vernon’s way of proceeding becomes markedly strange. He presents himself as a passionate agnostic, yet in service of that he misrepresents both atheism and science, thus making an honest discussion impossible as long as we take his terms at face value. How can we have honest doubt if we’re talking about things that we misunderstand because they’ve been misdescribed? Talking about science in terms of dogma and fundamentalism, and making it an equivalent of religion, is a profound misrepresentation, and it renders everything he says suspect. I’m sorry to say this (especially since he might read it!) but rhetoric of that kind makes it hard for me to believe that he’s arguing in good faith.

This rides roughshod over the intellectual ground that is genuinely fascinating, humanly enriching, and socially essential: the places where science and religion reach the respective limits of their understanding and meet. The militant atheist, like the fundamentalist believer, tries to rubbish such engagement because it offends their faith that science, or religion, can and should say it all.

More of the same – ‘faith’ that ‘science’ – ‘science, or religion’ as if they were equivalents – and the nonsense about the two reaching the respective limits of their understanding and then meeting. They don’t meet! Religion qua religion has no particular understanding – it incorporates various kinds of human understanding, often even including rational understanding, but not in any distinctively religious way, and to the extent that the ‘understanding’ is distinctively religious, it’s not understanding, it’s error. And the limits of scientific understanding don’t come anywhere near the limits of religious understanding, so ‘meeting’ is out of the question. It sounds cozy and friendly, but it’s bullshit.

34 Responses to “Extremes meet – or not”

I feel slightly bad about piling in on top of Mark Vernon again – but since you’ve posted it…

“I came to think that whether or not God exists is an open question, having pondered the arguments for and against several times over. And that keeping it open, rather than trying to find a knockout blow one way or another, is key. This is because, for all religion’s ills, for all its irrationality, religious traditions preserve a way of life that human beings are the poorer without.”

This paragraph seems to embody a real contradiction that it common in anti-atheist positions. In what way does it make sense to say that the question of the existence of God should be kept open _because_ religious traditions enrich our life? He is arguing from an ought to an is. Whether religion is nice has absolutely no bearing on whether or not God exists.

It strikes me that this position is rather common amongst the anti-atheist brigade – and perhaps accurately reflects their underlying motivation.

And who says “religious traditions” are something “human beings” would be poorer without? Some human beings, perhaps, like Vernon, but others of us would be a lot richer without religion, and are richer without it.

It’s the same old nonsense: that everybody has a “god-sized hole” somewhere in their anatomy (I refrain from saying where), that we need religion to be “human,” and that atheists are trying to “oppress” religious people by dissenting from them.

Reminds me of the slogan I saw not long ago outside a church–a Unitarian one, strangely enough (you’d think they would be above this sort of thing): “Church is where you go to learn to be human.” So the churchless have never learned to be human? What idiotic arrogance!

That enrichment thing leads to a further thought…Would it enrich our lives more if we believed Hamlet and Cordelia and Sancho Panza and Lisa Simpson really existed? I would say it enriches our lives more to know that they’re human inventions. ‘God’ is different of course, because ‘God’ is supposed to protect, console, love us etc (‘God’ does a bad job of it, of course, but never mind that for now), but still – a lot of what even believers love about religion is obviously human – the music, the windows, the mosques and cathedrals, the pope’s dress, the rituals, the illuminated manuscripts. It’s not completely clear that the enrichment and the belief are entirely entangled or causally interdependent.

And by the way – as for feeling bad about piling on Vernon – he’s still using that inaccurate tendentious hostile and frankly unfair modifier ‘militant’ about the kind of atheists he doesn’t like – so I don’t feel very bad. I dislike the way he persists in misrepresenting people he disagrees with, so frankly I think he deserves some piling.

Re: “Priest”. “I used to be a priest in the Church of England” So says Mark Vernon. Was he a high Anglican enclosed priest? “Anglicans represent a broad range of theological opinion, its prebyterate includes priests who consider themselves no different in any respect from those of the Roman Catholic Church, and others who prefer to use the title presbyter in order to distance themselves from the more sacrificial theological implications which they associate with the word priest” Or was he a pastor or vicar or rector, or curate. The word priest I thought was mostly synonymous with Roman Catholics/High Anglicans. Curiosity beckons. I am infamous for nitpicking. Ex-priest, somehow to me sounds much more controversial than plain ex-vicar!

Is MV saying that atheists are fundamentalist extremists because they’ve noticed a large and unbridgeable gap between scientific and religious approaches to knowledge, noticed that one is much more productive of reliable knowledge than the other, and that the only place they meet is some sort of lala land where a waterfall frozen into three streams counts as evidence of the trinity a la Francis Collins?

Since beyond the limits of our current understanding is only ignorance and unfounded speculation, I suppose it’s possible (though scarcely sensible) to say that science and religion and anything else we fancy meet there, though quite what it means to say this beyond the usual god of the gaps effusions, I have no idea.

For some reason, Mark Vernon’s column reminded me of George Orwell’s remark about words squirted out like a cuttlefish squirts out ink. Or maybe the pomo essay generator has been reprogrammed.

I have the same sort of reaction to much of Mark Vernon’s writing as Kiwi Dave. I find myself floundering in verbiage desperately trying to work out what it means. What point he is trying to make.

For instance, from another of his recent blog posts (not about atheism):-

For Socrates, though, true knowledge is to know in an entirely different way: it is to understand from within the experience of existence itself, not rational or irrational, not empirical or unempirical, not conscious or unconscious.

As Socrates said on a different occasion – in the Symposium – knowledge is not like water that can be poured from a jug into a basin. It is more like remembering something you didn’t know you had forgotten, as in the Meno. Or, as he suggests in the Phaedrus, discovering a place where you always already belonged.

What does this actually mean? From the rest of the post, perhaps it means nothing in the sense that this blog would use the word “mean”; something to do with a detailed shared understanding captured in words (Ophelia please improve this wild stab at a definition as required).

It then struck me that I had come across the particular literary form instanced here many times before. The linked post is essentially a high church Anglican sermon, but without God at the end. I have listened to literally hundreds of the genre, albeit not for some years (due to my pleasure in choral music); I would be interested to know if anyone in the same position shares this perception.

Mark Vernon, if you are reading this, I am not meaning to be attacking here, just trying to work out why I (and apparently others) find what you write so exasperating. I cannot read things without trying to work out what they mean, in the sense of what specific point the writer was aiming to convey.

Ah now that is very interesting. I hadn’t thought of that – not surprisingly, because I don’t hear high church Anglican sermons. On the other hand, I do have some fondness for 17th century prose, for Sir Thomas Browne and people like that – and I venture to guess that there is considerable common ground there. If you read that Socrates passage as a descendant of something from Religio Medici or Urne Burial then it becomes less baffling – it’s really not about making a point, it’s about a kind of musical pondering.

But musical pondering is wholly inappropriate for argumentative writing.

I had a quick Google, and the first hit was an excellent example, which is entertaining as the sermon in question is actually about something controversial (the split in the Anglican communion over the ordination of openly gay clergy, which rouhgly speaking, has the US and the UK on the modern side and Africa on the tradition side).

“Militant Atheism is also very much an oxymoron. As it is not used to define Atheists who take up arms to fight or kill believers in theism. Nevertheless, it is by them actually used to define people whom actively speak up about their ideas. In any other realm of discourse, all would say it that these people have a very strong opinion. However, because it is not socially acceptable to criticise religion or religious beliefs, theists automatically turn on the defensive. At this point, they find the need to label or demonise the opposition.

Whereas a fundamentalist or member of militant Islam would strike against the opposition with violence and tyranny, a “militant atheist” will fight the opposition with words and ideas. So sayeth Urban Dictionary.

“Bishops are assisted by the clergy. The “clergy” is a term applied widely across many religions. While a priest might be Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Orthodox Christian and a minister might belong to any Protestant church, both terms are used in Anglicanism to refer to those who have taken Holy Orders.” That explains all.

Yes, that Wiki page (Anglican ministry) explains it pretty well, if you care (vicars and rectors are something to do with tithes). And quite a few high Anglican priests like to be called “Father”. Basically, the higher church they are, the more Roman Catholic practices they adopt. (And note I say “Roman Catholic”; if you refer to the Roman Catholic church to a high Anglican, he will be irritated, because the Church of England is “one holy catholic and apostolic church” (I know that owing to having a high Anglican, not to say practically Popish, uncle).

No, I don’t know what it means, either, I can’t even remember whether I did when I was confirmed at age 10 (they did me early because I was baptised Roman Catholic, whatever difference that makes). Anyhow, I gave it all up in my mid-teens, apart from the music.

“It seems to me that Mark Vernon feels that mysticism – things being inexact, vague, approximate, veiled – is a good in itself. For poetry, maybe – but, as you say, not for philosophy.”

As a poet, I resent that!) But, in a way, it goes to the heart of the matter. What Vernon seems to be advocating is something perilously close to the mindset that is responsible for much bad art in general, but which has a particular tendency to manifest itself in the sentimental and self-indulgent outpourings that many of people more or less refexively associate with poetry. What I’m referring to is the inability to see that, inter alia, precision enables richness of meaning rather than destroying it, that vagueness isn’t depth, and fiction doesn’t have to be believed to work (or indeed to be true). It’s a sort of very reasonable (and, possibly, very English) puritism which, if you buy into it, can lead you pretty easily into the idea not just that those who don’t think like you are lacking in culture (philistine scientists) but lacking in some essential of humanity as well (uncultured brutes?).

Sorry if this comes across as a rant but this surfeit of Vernon has pushed all my buttons.

It doesn’t come across as a rant, and anyway what’s wrong with a rant or two between friends?

All the same…I think there is something to be said for allusiveness, for telling all the truth but telling it slant. I think that is one thing poetry can do, which doesn’t at all entail thinking it’s the only thing poetry can do or that poetry must do that. Although…I’m also allergic to grandiose vagueness that really doesn’t mean anything. Maybe I can’t consistently hold both those positions. I’m not sure…

Well, it sounds Irish, but I am going to answer my own question. I just this moment commit to memory having once visited an English Anglican Benedictine Abbey Monastery. I also remember having been rapt because of the parallel to the Roman Catholic Benedictine Abbey. The mainstream of nuns in both enclosed convents were all very highly educated and superbly talented people. They were mostly from the upper crust sections of English society. One of them before joining the Benedictines had made her debut as a pianist in London’s Wigmore Hall. She eventually left due to her anorexic state of health. The strict regime imposed on her in the convent took its toll. Mary O’ Hara was also in an enclosed order of a analogous sort in the north of England.

“when the subject is the physical world or human relations” – or Socrates. Somehow the two paragraphs on Socrates you quoted seem much less irritating when I read them as part of a sermon. One would think I would find them more irritating rather than less, but I don’t – I suppose because I expect less, or different, or both. I don’t irritate myself looking for something solid, I just lean back and listen to the music. It’s a different part of the brain, that’s what it is.

If you get rid of the references to Socrates, it might even be poetry:-

….true knowledge is to know in an entirely different way: it is to understand from within the experience of existence itself, not rational or irrational, not empirical or unempirical, not conscious or unconscious.

…knowledge is not like water that can be poured from a jug into a basin. It is more like remembering something you didn’t know you had forgotten. Or discovering a place where you always already belonged.